Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is the typical representative of the group born a generation after the women of the thirties, the group that knew nothing of the emotional fifties and sixties, and that began its work when the new literature of actuality, the realism of Flaubert and Hardy and Howells, was in full domination. Of hesitancy, of transition from the old to the new, her fiction shows no trace. From her first story she was a realist, as enamoured of actuality and as restrained as Maupassant. She seems to have followed no one: realism was a thing native to her, as indeed it is native to all women. "Women are delicate and patient observers," Henry James has said in his essay on Trollope. "They hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of life. They feel and perceive the real." But to her realism Miss Wilkins added a power usually denied her sex, the power of detachment, the epic power that excludes the subjective and hides the artist behind the picture. In all the writings of the creator of _Gates Ajar_ we see but the intense and emotional soul of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; in that of the writer of _A Humble Romance_ we see only the grim lineaments of New England, a picture as remorseless and as startling as if a searchlight had been turned into the dim and cobwebbed recesses of an ancient vault. She stands not aloof like Miss Jewett; she is simply unseen. She is working in the materials of her own heart and drawing the outlines of her own home, yet she possesses the epic power to keep her creations impersonal to the point of anonymousness. For her work, everything in her life was a preparation. She was born in Randolph not far from Boston, of an ancestry which extended back into the darkest shadows of Puritanism, to old Salem and a judge in the witchcraft trials. Her more immediate progenitors were of humble station: her father was first a builder in her native Randolph, then a store-keeper in Brattleboro, Vermont. Thus her formative years were passed in the narrow environment of New England villages. The death of her father and mother during her early girlhood must also be recorded, as should the fact that her schooling was austere and limited.